Man Impersonated Patriots Player to Obtain and Sell Replica Tom Brady Super Bowl Rings

A New Jersey man has pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining and selling three Tom Brady Super Bowl Rings. He now faces up to 92 years in federal prison, TMZ reports.

According to federal court filings, 24-year-old Scott Spina, who struck a deal with prosecutors and will plead guilty to 5 felony counts, allegedly concocted the scheme back in Sep. 2017, when he contacted a former New England Patriots player through Instagram. Spina offered to buy the player’s Super Bowl 51 ring and traveled to Georgia to meet with him. The player, identified in court filings only as “T.J.” was reportedly handed a bad check in exchange for the ring.

Before the check ultimately bounced, Spina had already sold T.J.’s Super Bowlring for $63,000 to a Southern California broker specializing in championship rings and had obtained a document with a web address for a company that sells Super Bowl rings, along with T.J.’s own username and password.

From there, Spina posed as the player to buy “three family and friends” Super Bowl 51 rings from the site with Tom Brady’s initials engraved on each one. He claimed that the family order was for the “baby of quarterback Tom Brady.” The 44-year-old quarterback had never authorized the rings, which Spina aimed to sell “at a substantial profit,” according to the plea agreement.

Spina received the rings in Nov. 2017, and arranged to sell them for $81,500 to an Orange County broker, who grew wary and ultimately backed out of the purchase after Spina claimed that he knew Brady’s nephews and that he was going to buy the rings off of them. Spina ended up selling the rings at an auction house for $100,000, and one of the rings was later sold in Feb. 2018 for $337,219, which tipped off the FBI’s art crime team.

“By pretending to be a New England Patriots player, the defendant was able to get Super Bowl rings from the company that issued them. But in offering the rings for sale, he was also selling their connection to Tom Brady — a story that simply did not hold up on close scrutiny,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber said. “Unfortunately, in his effort to profit on Tom Brady’s name, the defendant defrauded a number of people, including those at the ring company, the buyer of the rings, and those in the collectible market more broadly.”

Spina is set to make his first court appearance on Jan. 31. He faces 3 counts of wire fraud, and 1 count each of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft.